Poland asks European court to hide CIA secret torture prison case from public

An aerial view shows a watch tower of an airport in Szymany, close to Szczytno in northeastern Poland, September 9, 2008. It was identified as a potential site which the CIA used to transfer Al-Qaeda suspects to a nearby prison. (Reuters / Kacper Pempel) / Reuters

Poland has asked the European Court of Human Rights to bar media and public presence during an upcoming hearing on Poland’s complicity with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program that delivered terror suspects to secret prisons around the world.

The public hearing in Strasbourg, France, scheduled for Dec. 3,
will be the first arguments
testing allegations that the Polish government allowed the CIA to
operate a jail for supposed Al-Qaeda fighters in Poland.

The request for a private hearing “will be examined by the
court shortly,” a court spokesperson told Reuters.

Poland cited national security concerns as to why it wants the
hearing to remain confidential. The Polish government would not
comment on the story.

A Polish human rights group criticized the request for privacy,
saying the public deserves to know whether Poland allowed the CIA
to hide prisoners from the American court system.

"We should have the right to review this case in public,"
said Adam Bodnar, vice president of the Warsaw-based Helsinki
Foundation for Human Rights. "I do not see a reason for
confidentiality of proceedings."

Bodnar added that most of the evidence about the alleged CIA jail
is already public, and keeping it secret is pointless now. His
organization was instrumental in uncovering evidence of Poland’s
cooperation with the agency.

Former President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of the
secret detention centers,
or “black sites,” run by the CIA on September 6, 2006 -
nearly a year after they were first exposed by news outlets and
NGOs.

Poland began its own secretive investigation into the prison
allegations in 2008. In early 2012, Poland's Prosecutor General's
office began an investigation into former Polish intelligence
chief Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, who was charged in March 2012 with
facilitating the alleged CIA prison.

Suspected Al-Qaeda militants allege they
were tortured while in CIA custody.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) case was brought by
lawyers for Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both now
detainees waiting for charges at Guantanamo Bay.

The men allege they were kidnapped and held by the CIA at an
intelligence training facility near Stare Kiejkuty, in northeast
Poland. There, suspects “were subjected to enforced
disappearance and tortured between 2002 and 2005,” Amnesty
International said.

Nashiri claims that while at the Polish site, he was subjected to
torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and other
harsh treatments, “such as ‘mock execution’ with a gun and
threats of sexual assault against his family members,”
Amnesty reported.

Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month while in secret
CIA detention.

Nashiri and Zubaydah are also listed as parties in Poland’s own
investigation - which is separate from the European Court’s case
- along with a recently-added third man, Yemeni Walid Bin Attash.

Polish officials maintain the country did not host CIA jails,
though they admit that in 2002 and 2003, the CIA landed aircraft
at a remote airfield near the site of the alleged jail in
northern Poland.

Hosting such a secret prison violates the European Convention on
Human Rights and the UN Convention Against Torture, both of which
all European Union member states are bound to follow.

The Polish government has said it would prefer its own
investigation to run to completion before the European court
starts its case. But rights activists and lawyers for the alleged
detainees said the Polish investigation has slowed to avoid
embarrassing of the government, though prosecutors deny those
allegations.